Bulletin of the American Physical Society
64th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics
Volume 67, Number 15
Monday–Friday, October 17–21, 2022; Spokane, Washington
Session PT02: Tutorial: Particles, Beams and Coherent Radiation
2:00 PM–3:00 PM,
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
Room: Ballroom 100 B
Chair: Karl Krushelnick, University of Michigan
Abstract: PT02.00001 : Principles and applications of x-ray sources based on laser-plasma acceleration*
2:00 PM–3:00 PM
Presenter:
Felicie Albert
(Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab)
Author:
Felicie Albert
(Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab)
In spite of their scientific appeal that will remain evident for many decades, one limitation of synchrotrons and X-FELs is their typical mile-long size and their cost, which often limits access to the broader scientific community.
This tutorial will review the prospects of using plasmas produced by intense lasers as particle accelerators and x-ray light sources, as well as some of the applications they enable. A plasma is an ionized medium that can sustain electrical fields many orders of magnitude higher than that in conventional radiofrequency accelerator structures. When short, intense laser pulses are focused into a gas, it produces electron plasma waves in which electrons can be trapped and accelerated to GeV energies. This process, laser-wakefield acceleration (LWFA), is analogous to a surfer being propelled by an ocean wave. Many radiation sources, from THz to gamma-rays, can be produced by these relativistic electrons. Betatron x-ray radiation, for example, is produced when relativistic electrons oscillate during the LWFA process. This tutorial will also review several LWFA-driven sources in the keV-MeV photon energy range, including X-FELs, Compton Scattering, and bremsstrahlung sources.
An important use of x-rays from laser plasma accelerators we will finally discuss is their emerging applications, in particular in High Energy Density (HED) science. In these experiments, x-ray photons can pass through dense material, and absorption of the x-rays can be directly measured, via spectroscopy or imaging, to inform scientists about the temperature and density of the targets being studied.
*This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 and funded by the LLNL LDRD program under tracking codes 13-LW-076, 16-ERD-024 and 16-ERD-041. The Author acknowledges support from the DOE Office of Sciences Early Career Research Program (Fusion Energy Sciences) SCW-1575-1.
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